The only professions with rising home ownership

A look at shifting trends in home ownership by occupation

The housing crisis didn’t hit all professions equally. In fact, construction workers and builders are the only group who increased their rate of home ownership in the years after the recession, new research shows.

In an analysis of over 70 different professions before and after the recession (2007 to 2009, vs. 2010 to 2012), home ownership among construction workers rose 1 percentage point to 55.4% — the highest growth of any profession — and increased 0.7 percentage points to 65.4% among carpenters during the same period, according to real-estate website Trulia, which mined U.S. Census data for the statistics. Home ownership among electricians remained steady at 75% before and after the recession, the study found.

Construction workers did especially well, given the crash in the property market after 2008, says Susan M. Wachter, professor of real estate and finance at Wharton University of Pennsylvania. “The only sectors that saw growth are groups that have access to bargains and distressed housing and have the expertise to fix them up,” she says. Others are more perplexed by the increase among laborers, especially since they were among the hardest-hit professionals when the housing market crashed in 2008. “It’s certainly ironic,” says Don Frommeyer, president of the National Association of Mortgage Professionals, which represents mortgage brokers. Still, he says, the recovery in the housing market in 2013 should be of some consolation to those who are ready to get back on the property ladder.

What are real-estate trends in 2014?

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Homes.com executive vice president Brock MacLean joins MoneyBeat with a forecast for the real-estate market for the coming year. Photo: Getty Images.

Ownership for all other professions trended downward, though it varied among subsets of each group. Among high-school teachers, for instance, it fell by 0.4 points to 82%; for teachers’ assistants, by 1.7 points to 74.1%; for post-secondary teachers, by 2 points to 69%; and for other teachers and, by 4 points to 67.4%. “In many areas, especially rural neighborhoods, schools continue to consolidate, meaning that jobs disappear,” says Steve Langerud, workplace consultant at Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa. “Young teachers are particularly worried about their longevity in a community or school.” Unlike construction workers, however, most teachers are still above the average 70% home-ownership rate for all occupations combined.

Jobs that rose and fell based on consumer demand saw the highest declines. Home ownership before and after the recession declined by 2.6 points to 69.3% among first-line supervisors of retail workers, fell 2.6 points to 44.7% among cashiers and by 3.4 points to 63.7% among retail salespeople. (Retail workers are not as young as the staff at the local Abercrombie & Fitch might suggest: Just 23% are between 16 and 24 and have a median age of 38, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but they earn an average wage of $21,410, less than half the national average.) “Their ability to fill in the gaps with a second or third job is increasingly difficult and not stable,” Langerud says, “so they are putting off purchasing homes.” Hairdressers had the biggest decline of all professions: 5.8 points to 66.3%.

But there were some surprising declines among higher-paid professions too. Many saw their fortunes fall along with the property market. The home-ownership rate fell 2 points among chief executives and legislators, 3 points to 81% among physicians and surgeons, and 2.4 points to 82.3% among lawyers, judges, magistrates and other judicial workers. (CEOs have an average wage of $176,840, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.) “These professions tend to be older and richer, and home ownership tends to increase with age and income,” says Jed Kolko, chief economist for Trulia. There’s another theory: At least some of the people in these professions may have anticipated a property crash and flipped their homes, experts say.

And it’s not just younger workers who feel home ownership is slipping away, studies show. Although both the U.S. property market and the economy are showing signs of recovery, helped by low interest rates, workers’ belief in the American Dream remains deeply shaken, a new survey released last week concluded. Some 45% of older baby boomers ages 54 to 64 believe the American dream of having a steady job and owning a home is disappearing, up from 30% two years ago, according to The State of the American Family Study, a survey by life insurance company MassMutual and Forbes Consulting Group. Indeed, home-ownership rates for that 54-to-64 age group dropped from 81% in 2007 to around 77% last year, according to the latest data from the U.S. Census.

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